Managing your Deals in Zoho One using Zoho CRM

In this guide, we'll discuss how to manage deals in Zoho One using Zoho CRM. Deals are potential revenue opportunities that your business pursues with potential or current customers. Each deal moves through stages that reflect your sales process, forming a sales pipeline that helps you track opportunities, forecast revenue, and refine your sales strategy over time.

Areas covered

• Understanding your Sales Process

• Customizing Deal Stages

• Managing Multiple Pipelines

• Revising your Sales Process with Reports
   

Understanding your Sales Process

Your sales process is comprised of the steps that a deal moves through before it is won or lost. Thoroughly understanding your sales process is essential because it allows you to track deals as they progress and manage your overall sales pipeline.

Without a well defined process, sales might be inconsistent. One sales rep might skip crucial steps, while another might not capture required information. By understanding, documenting, and recreating your sales process in Zoho CRM, you create consistency, visibility into your sales process, and scalability with your activities. You'll also be able to forecast more accurately because the data in your CRM will be more reliable.

When you clearly define the steps your team takes to move a prospect towards a purchase, you can model these steps in a CRM. In Zoho CRM, each step in your sales process will correspond to a deal stage.

Check out this 9 minute video to learn how to build your sales process in Zoho CRM
 

Customizing Deal Stages

Zoho CRM provides a set of default deal stages:

• Qualification

• Needs Analysis

• Value Proposition

• Identify Decision Makers

• Proposal/Price Quote

• Negotiation/Review

• Closed Won

• Closed Lost
   

Customizing deal stages to match your sales process is one of the most important steps in implementing CRM. While these default stages can be a helpful starting point, every business should customize these stages to match their sales process. In Zoho CRM, you can add, remove, rename, and reorder the default stages to replicate the way you sell.

Customizing Zoho CRM to exactly follow the sales process that you use in your business is crucial. When the stages in your CRM match the way your team works in practice, your sales data becomes more meaningful. This makes it more likely that your team adopts and uses the system more consistently. If the deal stages in your CRM don't align with your actual sales process, you may end up with confusion and poor reporting.

For example, if you have a deal stage in your CRM that says "demo scheduled," but your team doesn't actually give demos, the stage adds unnecessary clutter and confusion. On the flip side, if your team performs an important sales step that is not represented in your CRM, you may lose track of a deal.

By customizing stages, you also improve the accuracy of your revenue forecasting because stages in your CRM reflect true progress towards closing. This way, you can make purchasing and hiring decisions that are more informed.

Check out this 10 minute video to learn how to customize deal stages in Zoho CRM
 

Customizing Deal Stages Story

Now let's take a look at how our example company, Corporate Cleaners, customized their deal stages to more accurately represent their real-life sales process.

When Corporate Cleaners began using the CRM, they started with the default deal stages. But after a few weeks, they realized that the out of the box stages did not accurately represent their sales process. For example, their deals often began when a company requested a quote for cleaning services. Their next step involved scheduling a walk through of the potential client's office to assess the space. Once they'd done the walk through, they then sent a proposal. Some of these steps already existed in their CRM, but were out of order. Some didn't exist at all.

To better match their sales process to their CRM, Corporate Cleaners decided to customize their deal stages. They changed their sales pipeline so it consisted of these deal stages:

• Quote Requested

• Site Visit Scheduled

• Proposal

• Closed Won

• Closed Lost

They first started by removing stages they didn't need. They got rid of the "Needs Analysis," "Value Proposition," and "Identify Decision Makers" stages because those didn't align with the way they worked with prospects. They also removed the "Negotiation" stage since their pricing model wasn't flexible.

After they removed stages that weren't relevant, they created new ones. They created two stages called "Quote Requested" to be the first stage of their process, and "Site Visit Scheduled" to reflect the real interactions they need to have with prospects to sign a client.

Finally, they kept "Proposal" as a stage because once they'd done the site visit, they still sent out a proposal. After making these adjustments, the sales team found it much easier to track progress and communicate with customers and prospects, since every stage now represented a familiar part of their process.

Managing Multiple Pipelines

In Zoho CRM, a pipeline is a visual representation of your sales process. Zoho CRM supports multiple pipelines, which is useful if an organization sells different products or services in different ways, or if they sell to different types of customers in different ways.

For example, sometimes a business will have a separate sales process for new customers than for existing customers. Using multiple pipelines allows each of these sales processes to be tracked separately, with customized deal stages that reflect the actions specific to that process.

Having multiple pipelines is helpful because it prevents confusion among the sales team. Instead of combining every deal into one pipeline that tries to fit all situations, you can organize your deals according to product or service type, region, sales strategy, customer type, and more. This structure ensures that each pipeline represents a distinct sales process.

Multiple pipelines also help management analyze how different parts of the business are performing. You can see which areas are generating the most revenue, where deals tend to get stuck, and how conversion rates compare between pipelines. By aligning each pipeline with a specific sales process, you create a clearer structure that drives consistency, improves forecasting, and supports smarter business decisions.

Check out this 5 minute video to learn how to manage multiple pipelines in Zoho CRM

Revising your Sales Process with Reports

Once your CRM has deals moving through it, reports and dashboards become essential tools for understanding how your sales process is performing. Zoho CRM's reporting features turn deal activity into measurable data that helps you identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. By reviewing your reports regularly, you can make informed decisions that keep your sales as efficient as possible. Zoho CRM includes a variety of out-of-the-box reports that make this process easier.

An example of a pre-made report is the deals by stage report. This report shows how many deals exist in each stage of your sales process, and can help you spot bottlenecks where deals get stuck. If you look at this report and see that most deals are stuck near the beginning stages like "Qualification" or "Needs Analysis," it may show that your team is generating buyer interest but is struggling to move prospects forward. If most deals are stuck in later stages like “Proposal” or “Negotiation” without closing, it could signal that prospects are hesitating or that your team needs better closing resources.

In addition, you can filter this report and look at deals by sales rep, pipeline, or time period to get more specific insights. Over time, this consistent visibility helps refine your sales process by showing where deals move smoothly and where extra support or process changes are needed.

Using reports to refine your sales process produces a feedback loop of continuous improvement. By looking at the areas where your sales is performing well and looking at areas where it isn't, you can make targeted adjustments that leads to a more efficient sales process.

If you'd like to learn more about reporting within Zoho, you can check out this link.

Check out this document to learn how to build reports in Zoho CRM